Consent for targeted advertising: the case of Facebook
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Consent for targeted advertising: the case of Facebook Sourya Joyee De1 · Abdessamad Imine2 Received: 10 March 2020 / Accepted: 13 April 2020 © Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) recognizes the data subject’s consent as one of the legal grounds for data processing. Targeted advertising, based on personal data processing, is a central source of revenue for data controllers such as Google and Facebook. At present, the implementation of consent mechanisms for such advertisements are often not well developed in practice and their compliance with the GDPR requirements can be questioned. The absence of consent may mean an unlawful data processing and a lack of control of the user (data subject) on his personal data. However, consent mechanisms that do not fully satisfy GDPR requirements can give users a false sense of control, encouraging them to allow the processing of more personal data than they would have otherwise. In this paper, we identify the features, originating from GDPR requirements, of consent mechanisms. For example, the GDPR specifies that a consent must be informed and freely given, among other requirements. We then examine the Ad Consent Mechanism of Facebook that is based on processing of user activity data off Facebook Company Products provided by third parties with respect to these features. We discuss to what extent this consent mechanism respects these features. To the best of our knowledge, our evaluation of Facebook’s Ad Consent Mechanism is the first of its kind. Keywords Targeted advertising · Social media · Consent mechanisms · Privacy · GDPR · Privacy harms
1 Introduction Today, powerful data controllers such as Facebook and Google collect a lot of personal data about their users from different sources including the users themselves, data brokers, other websites and applications. Their primary business model constitutes targeted advertising based on the processing of these personal data. Social media platforms have access to richer sources of data than other traditional web-based advertising platforms. Users themselves report many information about themselves including demographics and identities of friends explicitly and also implicitly reveal their interests and behaviour through their activities such as posts, comments, likes on pages and advertisement * Abdessamad Imine [email protected] Sourya Joyee De [email protected] 1
Indian Institute of Management Raipur, Raipur 493661, India
Lorraine University, Cnrs, Inria, Vandoeuvre‑lès‑Nancy, 54506 Nancy, France
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clicks (Andreou et al. 2018). These Ad platforms also allow advertisers to target users based on the detailed personal data available to them (Andreou et al. 2018). The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (European Commission 2016), which has come into force across Europe from 25th May 2018, recognizes consent of the data subject as one of the legitimate grounds for data processing. The central aim of
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